On a sprawling tour, Ma meets with artists, students, and activists, exploring culture’s contribution to social progress and deepening his mastery of Bach.

The cyclone of exuberance that is Yo-Yo Ma tore through the Washington, D.C., area at the end of November. The cellist is in the middle of a sprawling tour called the Bach Project, which involves performances of Bach’s six solo-cello suites in thirty-six places, on six continents. Classical music has taken to attaching the word “project” to undertakings large and small. If two or more Brahms symphonies are played, it becomes a Brahms Project. The Bach Project, though, is deserving of the name. Most of Ma’s concerts are slated for large spaces capable of accommodating thousands. Each is accompanied by a Day of Action, in which Ma meets with local artists, community leaders, students, and activists, exploring how culture can contribute to social progress. In Washington, the venue was the National Cathedral. The Day of Action took place in Anacostia, the historic African-American neighborhood in southeast D.C.

Ma began the day at We Act Radio, a progressive Anacostia station. Joining him was the jazz composer, bassist, and singer Esperanza Spalding, who, as a participant in the Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts program, works with a local school. Ma said that he had come to Anacostia because of the community’s efforts to strengthen itself through culture. “You give of yourselves from substance,” he said. “It’s not money, it’s not just work, it’s that you give of yourselves, and, when you do that, that’s when beauty emerges.” He then played the Prelude of Bach’s G-major Suite. Kymone Freeman, the station’s co-founder, approved. “This is the type of culture that should be exposed to our children,” Freeman told his listeners. “The first thing that gets cut is art. The last thing that gets funded is art.”

The next stop was Anacostia High School, where students were gathered for a midday assembly. Ma and Spalding collaborated on a rendition of “Song of the Birds,” a Catalan Christmas carol made famous by Pablo Casals. Student singers and rappers also performed; the standout was Myesha Freeman, who gave an astonishingly poised a-cappella rendition of Andra Day’s “Rise Up.” Ma talked to the kids about the nature of creativity: “It’s the tenacity or the will power or the stubbornness or the dog-with-a-bone aspect. You’re looking for something and you’re going to pursue it to the end of the earth, no matter what it takes.”

Ma then spoke to half a dozen students in a classroom. This was tougher than the inspirational remarks to the large crowd. The kids were guarded and nervous. One girl was openly skeptical, propping her head on her hand and side-eyeing Ma as he tried to lead a conversation about music and time. “I’m much older than all of you,” he said. “I’m sixty-three. That’s pretty old.” He paused. “You’re supposed to say, ‘You’re not that old.’ ” This got a laugh. “So I want to ask: how long does one week feel to you?” Pretty long, the students thought. One day felt long. “Now, this is weird,” Ma said, “because for me a week feels like a nanosecond. As we get older, something changes about how we feel time.”

He went on, “When you’re interested in something, time goes really quickly. When you’re bored, it goes really slowly.” He got out his cello to illustrate the point. First, he played a bit of Mark O’Connor’s wistful “Appalachia Waltz.” It was not what the students needed at the end of a long school day. When Ma asked, “How long did that feel?,” the skeptic answered, “Too long.” Students guessed that the piece had lasted fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five minutes. In fact, it had been a little over a minute. He then launched into the Gigue of Bach’s C-major Suite—robust, driving music that Ma brought off with his usual precision and élan. “Sounds great,” a boy wearing a hood over a cap said. It still felt long, but not as long.

This might have been the cue for Ma to sing Bach’s praises, but he never mentioned the composer’s name. Instead, he led the students in a simple meditation exercise, taking slow, deep breaths for a minute. “I get really anxious when I play sometimes,” he said. “This makes me feel a little safer.” The experiment prompted some giggling, but one student allowed that he felt better afterward. “A lot of us don’t feel safe in a lot of situations,” Ma told them. “Your breath is one thing you can control. One minute is something you can control. You don’t have to believe me. In fact, I don’t want you to believe me.” He challenged them to test his theory at home.

As Ma went on to his next destination—a town-hall meeting at the Anacostia Playhouse—he reflected on the session with the students. “I’m using music to get at something more basic,” he said. “You have to try to meet kids where they are, so they can jump up one step. I’m trying to give them a couple of tools to handle the enormous stress I know they’re under. Maybe because I am this visitor from another planet I can give them a message in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t hear. Pretty cool how they responded to the Bach, right? The guy’s still got it.”

Ma has been living with the Bach suites since he was a four-year-old prodigy. He has recorded the cycle three times; the latest version, “Six Evolutions,” came out this past summer, on the Sony label. The idea of using Bach as the basis for a wider social project came to him as he observed the potent effect that complete traversals of the suites had on diverse groups of people. Two pivotal performances were at Royal Albert Hall, in London, in 2015, and at the Hollywood Bowl, last year. I attended the latter event, and it was an awesome spectacle: seventeen thousand people, motionless and silent, listening to one man playing music from centuries ago.

The premise underlying the project—that “culture helps us to imagine a better future,” as Ma wrote in a program note—is open to question. It is far from clear that culture makes the world better. Put to wrong ends, it can make the world worse; Hitler and Stalin proved as much. In our own time, Valery Gergiev lends lustre to Vladimir Putin and Kanye West hypes Donald Trump. But Ma’s unfailing generosity of spirit—everything you have heard about the niceness of the man is true—gives substance to his homilies. At the National Cathedral, he picked up a microphone to ask, “What is this music for?” He answered, “It is to help me through life.”

At the Bowl, Ma said little, disappearing into the music. For the cathedral concert, which was presented by Washington Performing Arts, he was in a more boisterous mood. He wore a colorful scarf around his neck, and explained that he had found it at an Anacostia boutique called Nubian Hueman. “I’m doing all of my holiday shopping there,” he said. At the halfway point—there was no intermission—he motioned for the audience to stand, which was taken as a signal for an ovation. But Ma wasn’t seeking adulation: he wanted everyone to stretch. He proceeded to do a few jumping jacks while holding his multimillion-dollar cello in one hand.

The comedy ended when Ma picked up his bow. His readings of the suites have grown deeper and more searching in recent years. The rich, varnished sound that you hear on his first recording, from 1983, has been partly stripped away: the tone is more tensile, more vulnerable. The G-major Prelude begins casually, without the aura of Great Music unfolding. Midway through, in an ascent to a held high D, he trails off into silence, as if momentarily lost, and picks up again, with feathery, whispery strokes. The music grows louder toward the end, but it falls short of triumph, leaning lugubriously on the low G in the final bar.

Ma makes striking interpretive points throughout, but never in a fussy or willful way, as sometimes happens when musicians stick to the same repertory decade after decade. Ma has intoned the Sarabandes at enough funerals and memorials that they have become almost official anthems of mourning; but in performances of the full cycle he makes them spontaneous again, groping from note to note. The trill that recurs in the D-minor Sarabande has the quality of a prolonged shiver, a tremor of the spirit; Ma minutely varies it with each repetition, so that it becomes an extension of the nervous system. The piece that breaks down all my defenses is the E-flat Sarabande, which Ma delivers with heartbreaking tenderness, as if it were a lullaby for an absent child.

During the desolate expanse of the C-minor Suite, I was distracted by thoughts about the passage of time. I grew up near the cathedral and went to school on its campus. In this same space, I had once watched Leonard Bernstein rehearse Mahler’s Second Symphony; mangled an oboe solo in a school concert; and received my high-school diploma. I was haunted by memories of my younger self: solitary, fearful, more troubled than I knew. Back then, I would not have understood the emotional complexity of what Ma was offering—strands of an impossibly rich inner life interwoven.

Soft sounds around me suggested that others were caught up in similarly strong emotions. How Ma has this effect on people is a mystery: I suspect it has to do with the warmth he brings to music that is fundamentally beyond comprehension. He makes the godlike human. At the end of his National Cathedral concert, he sprang a surprise on the audience, one that provided an exhilarating release. After joking that he had just found Bach’s seventh suite, he brought out Howard University’s gospel choir. The group had earlier sung at a Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony at Union Station, where the Bach was simulcast. As they performed, Ma darted around in the back, urging people to their feet. The song was “Hold On (Change Is Comin’).” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the December 17, 2018, issue, with the headline “Bow Ideal.”